From Nino Frank, “A New Kind of Detective Story”

L’Écrán Français 61 (August 28, 1946); trans. Connor Hartnett

[T]he three others. . . are to the usual detective film what the novels of Dashiell Hammett are to those of Van Dine and Ellery Queen. They convey what people call "life." The detective is not a machine but the protagonist; that is to say, the character who matters the most to us. Thus the heroes of The Maltese Falcon and of Murder, My Sweet practice that strange trade of private detective which (in America) has nothing to do with the bureaucratic and is, as a matter of fact, completely outside the law, the law of the police as well as that of the "gang." The essential question is no longer to discover who committed the crime, but to see how the protagonist behaves (you don 't even have to understand, in detail, the stories in which he is involved). Only the enigmatic psychology of one or the other counts, at the same time friends and enemies. Even more important, the sock on the jaw or the pistol shot plays no role until the end. And it is certainly no accident that the two films end the same way, the cruelest of all-the heroines take it on the chin. These stories are tough and misogynous, like much of present day American literature.

I will not swear that they have succeeded: If The Maltese Falcon is exciting as can be (it was based on a novel by Dashiell Hammett), Murder, My Sweet is very uneven and, at times, empty (although it makes a good case for the novel of Raymond Chandler that is its source).

We find this toughness, this misogyny again in Double Indemnity. Here there's no mystery; we know everything from the beginning; we follow the preparation of a crime, its execution, its effects . . . . The interest then centers on the characters and the story is astonishingly clear and constantly sustained. It is Billy Wilder, the director who has done more than slavishly transpose the narrative scheme of the novel of James Cain on which the film is based. He began by writing with Raymond Chandler a magisterially precise scenario, which details adroitly the movements and the reactions of the characters. The film follows the scenario faithfully.

Thus these "black" films have nothing in common with the unusual detective films. Clearly psychologicaI stories, action, whether violent or lively, counts here less than the faces, the behavior, the words--therefore the truth of the characters, this “third" dimension of which I have just spoken. And that's great progress: after films like these the characters in the usual detective films seem like puppets. Today’s audience is particularly sensitive to this impression of life, of life as it is lived, and to certain atrocities that actually exist and that no good purpose is served in hiding. The struggle for life is not a present-day invention.